Friday, August 10, 2012

Back from the Wedding

I am back from the wedding in Spokane. The round trip was just about 1500 miles with a stop in Salmon.

I got some pictures of the Riverfront in Spokane and a ton of the wedding pictures. Sorry, the wedding pictures are only for the bride, groom and family. I will post the pictures of the riverfront later this week.

On the way up, we ate at the Signal Grill in Hamilton. I love traditional diners. On the way back we dined at Lou and Me in Malad, Idaho (the Sunday service was understaffed)..

It is always a great relief to get out of Utah to places where people are open and friendly.

The oppressive nature of Mormonism has been bearing down on me in the last couple of years.

My goal for the last four years has simply been to find a small group willing to spend a day discussing free market health care reform. The theme of the discussion would be that the problem is the use of group funding of individual consumption and the solution is to create an alternative to insurance based on self-funded care (NOTE An HSA + High Deductible Insurance is still insurance).

IMHO, the weakest point of ObamaCare is the insurance mandates. The mandates are based on the false assumption that insurance is the only way to fund health care. I contend that, if a group of patriots defined a viable alternative to insurance, they could use the alternative to directly attack ObamaCare and socialism at its weakest point.

This is the issue I want to discuss.

The peculiarities of Mormonism (and the left-wing reaction to Mormonism) means that I have to go some where else.

I do not want to talk about Mormonism or why it is oppressive.

I actually feel the same way about vampire movies. There is no truth in vampire movies; so I prefer not to waste any time discussing vampire movies.

I want to discuss health care. If the proponents of socialized medicine based their position on vampire movies, I guess I would be forced to discuss them, but only reluctantly.

Suffice it to say: Every major politician fronted by the LDS Church (Harry Reid, Mitt Romney, Governors Leavitt, Huntsman and Herbert) favor socializing medicine through State Run Health Exchanges.

They simply disagree on which group should wield the ring of power. Harry Reid wants exchanges run by the states that are regulated by the Federal Government. Romney wants exchanges run and regulated by the states. The Sutherland Institute (a supposedly free market group) wants exchanges run by the states and regulated by a non-elected government entity called a Health Compact.

The argument about who should run the socialized health exchanges is a false dichotomy.

The LDS Church has billions invested in insurance. Discussing alternatives to insurance would be political suicide in Utah. Both the left and right in Utah are for socialized medicine.

End of story.

I've accepted that, if I want to discuss free market health care reform, I have to travel (at my own expense) to somewhere else. The one and only way this could work is if a group of Libertarian minded folks organized the meeting.

Anyway, during the long to Spokane and back, I decided to write a post about why we need to worry about certain elements of the right.

Rather than writing about Joseph Smith (1805-1844), I thought I decided to write about Hegel (1770-1831) whose writings were all the rage during the early 1800s. Hegel is famous for his philosophy of history and as a founder of modern logic.

Hegel's philosophy of history is not all that new. It was extremely popular during the early 1800s (especially among conservatives). He invented an oppositional dialectics that claimed the world spirit evolved through conflicts on the world stage. He had a bizarre definition of freedom which is closer to the Mormon concept of Free Agency than to the Founders concept of Liberty (The founders saw liberty as self rule. They understood a kingdom as rule by king, and freedom as self rule.)

Of course many say it is absurd to think that a German philosophy born in 1770 could possibly have influence on an American born in 1805.

My next post will be titled "The Hegelian Right." I leave you to judge whether or not Mormonism was influenced by Hegelianism.